Emmy Hennings (1885 - 1948)

In Munich, Emmy Hennings had become an intimate of the Bohemian pack of the city while singing popular cabaret songs and reciting her own poems that addressed such themes as loneliness, death and captivity, before expressionist poets and artists. With her lover, Hugo Ball, she settled in Zurich, in 1915 and, as they had found work in a vaudeville troupe, decided to open their own cabaret in 1916, the Cabaret Voltaire where Emmy Hennings ensured the success of the venue - she was called the ‘Star of the Cabaret Voltaire’ - with her popular songs, dada poetry and performances. In 1920, the German performer moved into an intense catholic mysticism to which she introduced Hugo Ball while she saw her paintings hang along those of Wassily Kandinsky at the Galerie Dada. Despite having been an active member of the Dada movement and the co-founder of its place of birth, Emmy Hennings has since been almost completely erased from the history of the movement. This was due to her own inner conflict, her extreme practice of Catholicism contrasting with her debauched bohemian lifestyle but also because of her constant rewriting of her story and that of Hugo Ball during the latter part of her life. Dada artists and historians thus preferred to eclipse the role Emmy Hennings and turned her into a naive eccentric adorned by a childish bob haircut.